Many thanks both of you. I will try your recommendations when Mrs. P. goes out so that I can work on her suprise undetected. I sincerely hope that it has not caught a Trojan as AVG, Spybot and Adaware SE was loaded from my network and installed before the thing was allowed to play on the internet, with it's firewall up of course. The first sites it accessed were the appropriate ones to update the said programmes.
If it can be cured by a registry modification then why do the ***dy software writers make it as difficult as this? It would appear that just to ensure that the Acer advert is always uppermost in a punter's mind a whole facility is removed from the standard internet browser. Grrr............
P.P.
Edited to say: No luck I'm afraid chaps, A thorough run of Spybot failed to show up any infections, the tools facility mentioned showed that the home page was not locked, and on checking the registry, the keys indicated do not exist despite extensive use of the search facility even when searching on parts of the strings referred to. The subfolders inter net explorer\control panel (or internet) do not exist in the registry either.
the Acer page however continues to obstinately refuse to allow itself to be deleted or replaced in I.E. 7
P.P.
Last edited by P.Pilcher; 30th November 2006 at 19:42.
Reason: Additional info